Inside the Star

Toronto Blue Jays assistant GM Andrew Tinnish always learning

Like his boss Alex Anthopoulos, the 36-year-old Ottawa native has had an unlikely path to the Blue Jays’ front office. “I’m Canadian and I love baseball, so I can’t see myself being in any better job.”

At the time, Andrew Tinnish thought the twinge he felt in his left shoulder was the end.

It was 1999 and the hard-throwing left-hander — a walk-on star of Brock University’s burgeoning baseball program — was pitching through the pain to keep his job with the Quebec Capitales, a middling club in the unaffiliated Northern League.

But the shoulder injury that cut Tinnish’s fledgling pro career short after just a single season eventually led the Ottawa native to a more fruitful second life in the game — one that has seen him rise quickly through the Blue Jays’ organizational ranks from lowly intern to one of Alex Anthopoulos’s most trusted advisers.

“I probably would have continued to try and play independent ball as long as I could to see if I could catch on,” says Tinnish, 36.

Instead, he dedicated himself to learning as much as possible about the game he fell in love as a 7-year-old in the East Nepean Little League and on trips to Olympic Stadium with his dad to watch Andre Dawson and the Expos.

Now, little more than a decade after he ended his playing career, Tinnish is one of only five Canadian baseball-operations executives in all of Major League Baseball, joining Anthopoulos, Doug Melvin and Gord Ash in Milwaukee, and Farhan Zaidi in Oakland.

He moved into Anthopoulos’s inner circle midway through last season when after three years as director of amateur scouting he was promoted to assistant general manager, a title he shares with Tony LaCava and Jay Sartori.

Anthopoulos says it was “only natural” to have Tinnish take on a larger role with the big-league club given his wide range of experience and rare combination of scouting and front-office talents.

That has been the key to Tinnish’s ascent: a willingness to take on any role while absorbing as much new information as possible along the way.

Since joining the Jays on a summer internship in 2001, Tinnish has done a little of everything. He has fetched coffee and filed paperwork, analyzed statistics and worked on contracts, scouted both pros and amateurs, and for the last three years run the Jays’ draft — the fruits of which played a pivotal role in the club’s off-season bonanza.

Tinnish even threw batting practice in 2002, after the club fired manager Buck Martinez and nobody on Carlos Tosca’s new staff could pitch.

“Maybe I wasn’t the best at any one area,” Tinnish says, “but I was comfortable in a lot of different areas.”

Like Anthopoulos — who famously began his career with the Montreal Expos by sorting players’ fan mail — Tinnish’s path to the Jays’ front office is an unlikely one. His achievements all seem to begin with an unlikely shot in the dark.

After getting rejected or ignored by dozens of U.S. colleges, Tinnish caught wind of a new baseball program starting at Brock, so he left a message with the coach asking about tryouts.

It was late summer 1995 and the 19-year-old outfielder and pitcher was playing for the Ottawa Nationals in the provincial championships in Guelph. After making the six-hour trip home on Sunday night, Tinnish heard back from Brock’s coach: the first tryout was the next morning in St. Catharines.

Unfazed, he packed up his gear and drove through the night back across the province. He slept a couple of hours on his grandparents’ couch in Stoney Creek and was the first one at the ballpark in the morning.

“It kind of said right away what kind of kid he was,” says Lounsbury.

Tinnish became Brock’s inaugural captain in his freshman year, leading the team to two national championships before he left the program as its most celebrated player. Last year he was named the best ballplayer in Brock history.

“He had an incredible eye for the game,” says Lounsbury, who still coaches at the university.

In the spring of 1999, Tinnish made plans for another long shot by trying out for the minor-pro Capitales. But as tryouts loomed he got cold feet. He told Lounsbury he was bailing. “I told him, ‘You’ll regret it the rest of your life.’”

Tinnish changed his mind and, just as he had at Brock, he made the team as an unrecruited walk-on.

He took to carrying around a notebook, which he filled with bits of baseball wisdom gleaned from teammates and coaches.

“I’d bring it with me on the road, because I’d just be sitting in the bullpen talking with guys who had been around a lot more than I had,” he says. “It was my way of gathering information.”

“We spent a lot of hours in vans just driving around, talking players, and I think that’s kind of where I got my foundation for scouting.”

His gig with Baseball Ontario led to a summer internship with the Jays in 2001. After surviving the transition from Gord Ash to J.P. Ricciardi, he was hired as a front-office assistant and later as an area scout.

In 2004 he was promoted to scouting co-ordinator alongside Anthopoulos, a young scout who had recently come to the Jays from the Expos.

Both quick studies and still in their 20s, the pair was poised to move quickly up the scouting ladder. They forged a bond that would prove valuable to Tinnish years later when Anthopoulos replaced Ricciardi as GM before the 2010 season. With Anthopoulos at the helm, Tinnish was named director of amateur scouting and placed in charge of the draft.

Today Tinnish credits Anthopoulos with much of his professional growth. “He challenges and motivates you to do the best at your job, whatever it is.”

Who knows how the rest of his career will pan out, but as a Canadian whose entire baseball life has been in this country, he can’t imagine working anywhere else.

“We’ve been through a lot of ups and downs here and a lot of frustrating times,” he says. “Sometimes you step back and you feel like a fan, like, you want to win here so badly.”

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